Managing Underperformance: The Conversation Most Managers Avoid Too Long

There's a specific moment I've seen play out dozens of times. A manager mentions, almost as an aside, that someone on their team "isn't really pulling their weight." I ask how long that's been going on. The answer is almost never "since last week." It's usually months. Sometimes longer. And when I ask what's actually been said to the person directly, the answer is often nothing or something so softened it barely registered as feedback at all.

I don't think managers avoid this because they don't care. I think they avoid it because the conversation feels disproportionate to have about something that, on any given day, looks small. Being ten minutes late isn't a big deal on Tuesday. It's only a big deal once you notice it's every Tuesday, and by then you've let three months go by without saying anything, and now the conversation you need to have feels much bigger than the thing that's actually wrong.

The distinction that actually matters

Before anything else, I ask one question: is this a can't, or a won't? Capability or conduct. It sounds obvious once it's said out loud, but I promise you it changes everything about how the conversation should go, and it's the thing people skip past fastest.

If someone genuinely doesn't know how to do something, or hasn't been shown properly, or is working with tools or training that don't match what's being asked of them, that's not a discipline conversation, and treating it like one will make things worse, not better. If someone knows exactly what's expected and isn't doing it, that's different territory entirely. I've watched managers run a full disciplinary process against someone who was, genuinely, doing their best with inadequate training, and I've watched the opposite too, where a manager kept offering "support" to someone who simply wasn't trying, for far longer than was fair to the rest of the team.

Why the quick conversation is almost always right

Most performance issues get resolved by a short, direct, unglamorous conversation. Not a meeting with an agenda. Not a formal write-up. Just: "I've noticed X, what's going on?" That's it. Most of the time, and I mean most of the time, there's a reasonable explanation, or the person genuinely didn't realise it was a problem, and it gets sorted there and then.

The reason managers put this off isn't usually about process. It's about discomfort. Nobody enjoys telling someone their work isn't good enough. So the conversation gets rescheduled, or softened into something vague, or replaced with a passive comment dropped into a team meeting that everyone assumes is aimed at someone else. None of that actually works. The person the comment was meant for often doesn't even clock it.

What happens if the quick conversation doesn't fix it

If it doesn't shift after that first honest conversation, that's when it needs to become more deliberate, clear expectations written down, a specific timeframe, a specific review point. Not because you're building a legal case (though you might need one eventually), but because vague expectations produce vague improvement, and vague improvement is impossible to assess fairly later.

A real example that stayed with me involved an employee whose manager kept saying they needed to “be more proactive” and “communicate better.” The employee genuinely thought they were doing enough because the expectations were never made clear.

We replaced the vague feedback with specific expectations: respond to internal emails within one working day, send a Friday update on outstanding tasks, and flag any risk to deadlines early. Within a few weeks, performance improved and the tension between the manager and employee reduced significantly.

I’ve also seen the opposite. In another case, the manager relied on “they should know what’s expected.” Nothing was written down, feedback stayed subjective, and when the matter moved into a formal capability process, there was little evidence that the employee had ever been given clear expectations. The process became longer, more stressful, and much harder to manage fairly.

Clear expectations don’t guarantee success, but without them, both performance management and fairness become much more difficult.

One thing I'd say clearly, because I don't think it gets said enough: if you're at the point of formal performance management, the standard you're measuring against has to be something the person could plausibly have hit. I've seen "improvement plans" set targets that were unrealistic from day one, not because anyone was being deliberately unfair, but because nobody actually checked whether the target was achievable before writing it down. That's not a fair process, even if every procedural box gets ticked.

The thing I'd want every manager to actually internalise

Delay is not kindness. It feels kind in the moment, you're sparing someone an uncomfortable conversation, you're giving them "one more chance" quietly rather than formally. But six months of silence followed by a sudden formal process feels far worse to the person on the receiving end than an honest conversation would have felt back at week two. And it's worse for you too, because now you're managing a bigger problem with less goodwill and less trust than you'd have had if you'd just said something when you first noticed it.

If there's genuinely one habit I'd want every manager I work with to build, it's this: say the thing, early, plainly, and kindly. Everything else in performance management is really just what happens if that first conversation doesn't do the job.